Contemporary Measures of Attitudes toward Blacks

Abstract

This paper reports the development of two scales to measure racial attitudes in contemporary society. Racial attitudes are difficult to assess in modern society since these negative attitudes are often masked by rationalizations that purportedly do not have to do with racial prejudice. The scales reported here are adapted from earlier racial attitude scales-specifically, the "Social Distance Scale" (Bogardus, 1933; Westie, 1953) and the "Social Situations Scale" (Kogan and Downey, 1956). Both were substantially revised and updated. Factor analyses, validity measures, and reliability coefficients are reported for the two scales and the subscales. The subjects were university teacher education students and students in general education courses in sociology (N = 286).

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